what do the pros read?

In an effort to promote both Google Reader and its bundles*, Google has asked leading journalists in technology, fashion and food amongst others to identify the blogs/websites that they read the most.

Some of the people that caught my attention were:

1. Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief, Wired)

2. Adam Pash (Editor, Lifehacker)

3. Thomas Friedman (Foreign-affairs Columnist, NY Times)

Would have been nice to have some presence outside the US and also some non-journalists mind!

[update] Forgot to add.. you can see the bundles online here.

*Google Reader bundles are lists of RSS feeds which you can subscribe to using Google Reader – it is a quick way to find other websites/blogs that have content that might be of interest to you.

[image credit: Kevin H.]

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Everyone talks about email bankruptcy, but somehow I never suffer from it. I have many email accounts and each serves its own funtion whether it is online services, personal, work or online registrations. As a result I am able to get through the majority of my email. Outlook 2007 for work and Gmail for the rest has worked well.

Not so with RSS. Today for about the 3rd time this year I am declaring RSS bankruptcy and marking the 1000+ posts I have not read as read and starting again. I do not have enough time in the day to get through the 300+ posts Google Reader receives daily (as if to illustrate my pain, the trends feature in Google Reader is giving an error right now LOL).  The problem though is not just the volume.

It is the efficiency of the tool.

Too many of the posts are on the same news item (product x releases new feature y) or even worse is the same article shared by different friends. I can image the former is more difficult to achieve but surely the latter is much easier to resolve.

Imagine the ability to mark as read all articles about a certain news story.. no more rss bankruptcy..

I have seen a couple of occasions where it seems to me that certain companies just cannot count!

Today whilst playing catchup on my rss feed, I noticed that my Google Reader all items count was awfully high. A quick total up of unread items by feed gave 458.. all items is 548! A more obvious mistake was in Pownce. There it said I had 5 friends whereas I have 6 listed?!

Surely this is something simple to get right?

Check out ReadBurner by Alexander Marktl. It shows you the popular shared items on Google Reader and even more interestingly shows you who is sharing your items, therefore indirectly telling you who is reading your blog. Very interesting. Make sure you look for your link on the statistics page after you have burned your link blog.

I would surely have expected Google to roll something like this out – maybe integrated into Google News.